I can’t be the only person in America who, at about minute 35 in President Obama’s almost hour-long “framing” speech in Cleveland Thursday, wanted to tell the president, as the Dude famously screams at Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, “You’re living in the past!”

Obama’s overly long, repetitive, and by turns self-pitying and self-congratulatory address was so soaked through with nostalgia that MSNBC should have broadcast it in sepia tones. The speech—which even the liberal Obama biographer Jonathan Alter called one of the president’s “least successful” political communications—revealed an incumbent desperately trying to replay the 2008 election. But no oratory will make up for a flawed record and a vague, fissiparous, and unappealing agenda.

The president himself forced this abrupt re-launch of his reelection campaign. After a bad week that began with terrible job numbers, proceeded to Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall, and culminated in awful fundraising news, Obama tried to recover last Friday by addressing the press on the state of the economy. Except things went horribly wrong. The president uttered six words—“the private sector is doing fine”—that not only will plague him for the rest of the campaign, but also perfectly captured his complacent attitude toward all things outside the realm of government.

The moment prompted a burst of panic throughout the Democratic hive mind, with media types clucking their tongues at the president’s campaign and party strategists questioning the salience of his message. Yesterday’s event in Ohio was thus intended to serve as a sort of domestic analogue to President Obama’s “reset” with Russia. By the looks of things, it will prove to be just as unsuccessful.

The very idea that Obama has the ability to shape his political fortunes through rhetoric is a backwards-looking myth. It is part of the pop narrative of Obama’s 2008 candidacy, in which the young freshman senator was able to rescue his moribund campaign from the evil Clinton machine by giving a single speech at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner in November 2007. More likely it was Obama’s antiwar stance in an antiwar party that gave him the edge in the Iowa caucuses the following January, but that has not stopped the president or his supporters from having an almost theological attachment to his oratorical prowess.

The evidence in this case, however, is decidedly on the side of the nonbelievers. The Washington Post counts over 500 speeches or appearances where the president has mentioned health care, but his overhaul remains remarkably unpopular. The president’s campaign appearances on behalf of Creigh Deeds in Virginia, Gov. Jon Corzine in New Jersey, Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, and Rep. Tom Perriello in Virginia were unsuccessful, which may have been why he didn’t even bother to campaign in Wisconsin for Tom Barrett (who lost anyway). A televised address last July did not win Obama his lusted-after tax increase on the rich, nor did remarks to a joint session of Congress win passage of his American Jobs Act. Eleven “major” speeches on the economy have not generated a full recovery or prevented economic indicators from backsliding. Indeed, one of President Obama’s few accomplishments has been to prove, definitively, the worthlessness of the bully pulpit.

Obama puts his verbal talents to use by fashioning straw men who flatter his ideological prejudices. There are, for example, only two types of Republicans in the president’s speeches: dead or defeated ones who happened to be reasonable people who acted in good faith, and living and successful ones who “believe that if you simply take away regulations and cut taxes by trillions of dollars, the market will solve all of our problems on its own,” and who want to end “the guarantee of basic security we’ve always provided the elderly, and the sick, and those who are actively looking for work.”

Surrounded by this army of hay, Obama and his staff have discovered a strange and newfound respect for Senator McCain, whom they defeated by seven points three and a half years ago, and who regularly denounced his own supporters when he disagreed with them. “I had some strong disagreements with John McCain,” the president recalled wistfully at a Philadelphia fundraiser Tuesday, “but there were certain baselines that we both agreed on,” such as immigration amnesty, global warming, and the regulation of political speech. And so McCain has become, in Obama’s imagination, the perfect Republican: honorable, moderate, and unsuccessful.

This is part of the president’s attempt to turn 2012 into a replay of 2008. In Obama’s absurd telling, every Republican president prior to George W. Bush would have been comfortable with the economic agenda of the contemporary Democratic Party. Lincoln backed the transcontinental railroad, so obviously he would have supported a $4 trillion government, most of which is spent on checks for old people. Eisenhower proposed the Interstate Highway System to maneuver troops, civilians, and missiles in case World War III broke out, which naturally suggests he would have supported stimulus bills that pay off public sector and construction unions and finance alternative energy moguls who donate to Democratic campaigns.

In his Cleveland speech, Obama preposterously invoked the memory of Nixon—Richard Nixon—because the second-most reviled Republican in modern memory “created the Environmental Protection Agency.” Ronald Reagan? Forget supply-side economics and the Strategic Defense Initiative and the 1986 tax reform and Iran-contra. “He worked with Democrats to save Social Security,” and “raised taxes to help pay down an exploding deficit.” All is forgiven.

Obama writes these fictional historical portraits not to pay tribute to his antecedents, but to explain, in a self-serving way, his lack of executive achievements. The economy is suffering and the deficit is hemorrhaging, he suggests, only because today’s GOP is so radical and unreasonable. (This is the same party, incidentally, that won 51 percent of the national House vote in the most recent election.)

The country’s troubles, we are told, were caused by Obama’s direct predecessor, whose decapitated head recently made a cameo appearance on HBO. “It’s like somebody goes to a restaurant, orders a big steak dinner, martini and all that stuff, and then just as you’re sitting down, they leave and accuse you of running up the tab,” Obama told Baltimore donors during one of the six fundraisers he held Tuesday. Of course, not 24 hours later, he stiffed the BBQ restaurant where he had held a Father’s Day lunch with two servicemen and two barbers.

“The problems we’re facing right now have been more than a decade in the making,” he told his audience in Cleveland. He mentioned our “decade” of problems eight times, subtly excusing his inability to improve the domestic situation by diminishing any role he may have had in creating or prolonging it.

The president’s grossest use of nostalgia, however, has to be in his appeals to the aftermath of the Second World War, when “there was a general consensus that the market couldn’t solve all of our problems on its own; that we needed certain investments to give hardworking Americans skills they needed to get a good job, and entrepreneurs the platforms they needed to create good jobs; that we needed consumer protections that made American products safe and American markets sound.”

Here Obama conjures up a progressive Eden, when Democrats and liberal Republicans shared the presidency, and Democrats ruled Congress practically without interruption. He holds this rather peculiar and problematic historical situation as a scenario that might be replicated. It can’t. It shouldn’t. One of the reasons America was doing well economically at that time was that much of the rest of the world was a rubble-strewn junkyard. Nor did women or African Americans or gay people exactly participate in this time of “shared prosperity.” Oddly for someone with intellectual pretensions, Obama never asks why the politics of the New Frontier and Great Society came to a fairly disastrous end. He wouldn’t like the answer.

We are left with the paradox of a backward-looking progressive calling on the American people to march forward. No wonder the public is anxious, and worried about the future. Our incumbent president is holding a giant pity party, while failing to address the nation’s challenges in a responsible manner. Like Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak, Barack Obama is a man living in the past. And there is no Dude or Donny to save him.

This entry was posted in Obama Campaign and tagged Bully Pulpit, Cleveland

Barack Obama doesn’t have George W. Bush to kick around anymore. At least not credibly. Sure, he will continue to argue that he inherited such a mess that his own policies can only be regarded as a smashing success. But it’s been four years since the patient was turned over to the new president for treatment, and the economy’s stubborn failure to recover its robustness tells us something about the efficacy of the Obama medicine. Which makes it increasingly difficult for him to continue to play the blame-GWB game. So Obama has found a new cause of falling growth and stubbornly high unemployment: Europe.

Now, no one can argue that our European friends are paragons. They have fiddled while Athens burned; done too little too late to save Spain’s financial system; forced an exodus of talent such as Ireland hasn’t seen since the potato famine (I exaggerate); replaced democratically elected governments in Greece and Italy with “technocrats”; issued a plethora of communiqués that amused but did not calm the markets; and adopted policies that have driven deficits up by stifling growth. Plenty of stuff to warrant a presidential j’accuse. Except for two things: The American pot is ill-placed to call the European kettle black, and the president’s lack of personal support from his colleagues at the G7, G20, and other meetings makes him a less-than-ideal policy salesman. More important, the president’s attempt to set Europe up as the new fall guy for his failed policies​—​besides Bush, other alibis have included supply chain interruptions due to Japan’s tsunami​—​seems, shall we say, lacking in empirical support.

Europeans are disinclined to accept American advice for two reasons. First, our deficit exceeds that of the eurozone as a whole, and according to the latest studies by the Congressional Budget Office, we are in danger of incurring so much debt that economic growth will be well-nigh impossible. Hardly a model to which Europe should aspire. When Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to advise Europeans to step up borrow-and-spend, he was met with scorn. “It’s always much easier to give advice to others than to decide for yourself,” German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble announced to the press, a thought usually expressed in the privacy of a conference room. Second, our political gridlock makes the slow-moving decision process of the eurocracy seem speedy, and our partisan feuding the acrimonious Germany-versus-everyone-else circus in Europe a lovefest. Obama’s pleas to the Europeans to speed up decision-making are, to put it mildly, lacking in credibility.

On a more personal level, Obama has trouble getting a hearing from his European counterparts, I am told by attendees at various G7, G8, G20, and G-whatever meetings. He stands aloof from them, a man apart in gatherings of politicians who are by instinct flesh-pressers. Reliable informants tell me that his colleagues at these meetings would at times do George W. Bush a favor when he needed one for domestic political purposes​—​they liked him even if they found some of his policies insufficiently pacific.

Obama enjoys no such advantage. This is the man who couldn’t get the Olympics for his hometown of Chicago, and who was treated with contempt by China, and ignored by other nations at a meeting in Denmark when he sought some progress on global warming to advertise to his green constituents. This is also the man whose partner in a diplomatic reset, Vladimir Putin, said he was too busy to attend the G8 and NATO meetings at which President Obama served as host, and then found time between harassing dissidents to hop over to Beijing for a round of meetings.

The president’s lack of standing with his European counterparts is unfortunate. With Germany so far sticking to its austerity über alles policy, an American voice calling for more emphasis on pro-growth policies would be an important counterweight. Never mind: The Europeans will have to work that out with German chancellor Angela Merkel, and persuade her that hardworking Germans should transfer more of their income and wealth to the rest of Europe​—​a task made more difficult by French president François Hollande’s decision to roll back one of Nicolas Sarkozy’s reforms and lower the retirement age for many workers from 62 to 60 years, while Germans are expected to remain in the traces until 65-67 years of age.

So much for where we are. Now for where we are going. Economists are uncertain, but the consensus seems to be that such growth as our economy will chalk up between now and the election will be insufficient to create enough jobs to make his stimulus program a talking point for the president and his supporters, especially if the recent slowdown in consumer buying persists. No surprise, says the White House: The European contagion has hit our shores. Why, just look at the devastating effect of Europe’s unfolding recession on our exports. Well, let’s look.

While exports have been contributing to our recovery, we remain a nation not highly dependent on peddling stuff to foreigners. To the extent that we do, our leading customers are Canada and Mexico, not widely considered European countries. Last year, total exports accounted for a bit less than 14 percent of our GDP, 22 percent of which went to the EU​—​or 3.1 percent of GDP. Last month, the month of the miserable jobs report that the president wants to pin on the EU, our exports to that troubled area dropped by some 11 percent, or 0.3 percent of our GDP. If anyone outside of the White House believes that such a trivial drop in shipments to Europe caused job creation here to slow, he has yet to emerge.

Indeed, the mechanism by which Europe’s troubles will reach our shores is, to put it mildly, unclear. Our mutual funds have greatly reduced their exposure to Europe’s banks, and our own banks are in far better shape and less linked to their European counterparts than ever. In fact, it can be argued that Europe’s difficulties have made America more of a safe haven for flight capital, thereby helping to keep both interest rates and inflation here low as the strong dollar puts downward pressure on commodity prices.

There is one contagion mechanism that might, only might, fit the president’s narrative as he attempts to divert attention from his failed policies by pinning blame on Europe​—​and most especially on Frau Merkel, who continues to link aid to her less fortunate eurozone colleagues to their willingness to rein in their trade unions, reform their labor markets, and take an ax to their public sector payrolls. Wall Streeters, or some of them, contend that a worsening of the situation in Europe, especially a Grexit​—​Greek exit from the eurozone​—​will rattle stock markets here, cause a flight from shares, and hit investors in their pocketbooks, with knock-on effects on consumer spending and business investments. But as the estimable Bret Stephens pointed out last week in the Wall Street Journal, previous overseas financial upheavals have had no such effects on the U.S. economy. Do not confuse the instantaneous response of the stock market with a fundamental change in the economy. After the 1997 collapse of Asian currencies, the Dow plunged, but the economy did not, growing at better than 4 percent, a feat it repeated after the Russian ruble crisis. “Bear this not-so-ancient history in mind,” writes Stephens, “as the Excuse-Maker-in-Chief cites another imploding region to explain 1.9 percent growth and 8.2 percent unemployment.”

None of this is to deny that some U.S. companies will find life a bit less pleasant should the European recession deepen and lengthen. They will: Starbucks is already seeing a slight drop in sales in Europe. Nor should we be as confident that we will escape any fallout from a European financial upset and its ripple effects as the president is that we will be hit hard by such an event. If we learned anything from the aftermath of the demise of Lehman Brothers it is that we should not be overly confident in our ability to understand all of the interconnections in global financial markets. So it is not inappropriate to worry. But neither is it appropriate to excuse the president’s inability to cope with our economy’s weakness by a serial hunt for some outside force on which to place the blame. Or the Republicans’ willingness to make it easy for the president to avoid a grand compromise on fiscal policy by elevating a desire for lower taxes on high earners to the sole, or at least the primary goal of economic policy.

In the end the course of the American economy will be determined not in Berlin, but in the voting booths of America, where voters face a choice, not an echo​—​a choice between a candidate who believes, really believes, that America’s future prosperity depends on an expansion of the public sector, and one who seems more likely to see our salvation in unleashing the private sector by reducing regulations and reforming the tax system. So far, Europe’s voters have been denied a voice in their economic future by a eurocracy skilled at avoiding the ballot box. We are luckier here in America.

Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, and a columnist for the Sunday Times (London).

June 18, 2012 4:00 A.M.Obama’s RevisionismHe predicted a strong economy, but blames his failure on Bush.By John R. Lott Jr.

Americans’ patience is running thin. Unemployment has been above 8 percent for 40 months. Since the recovery started, over 7.2 million Americans have given up looking for work and left the labor force. It is during recessions, not recoveries, that people are supposed to give up looking for work.

But it is obviously all Bush’s fault. At least, that is President Obama’s new take. During his big economic address on Thursday, Obama repeatedly said that the economic problems we face today were “a decade in the making.”

But there is a problem with Obama’s logic. Over the last three-and-a-half years, the president and his administration have continually claimed that the stimulus was working and that a robust recovery was starting. If the legacy of the Bush administration policies was going to hinder the recovery so badly, why did Obama keep on predicting that things were going to get better soon?

Recall that Obama told the Today show’s Matt Lauer in February 2009: “We’re starting to make some progress. But there’s still gonna be some pain out there. If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s gonna be a one-term proposition.”

What about his economic predictions concerning the stimulus? On January 9, 2009, the incoming Obama administration predicted that the unemployment rate was going to peak at 7.9 percent during July, August, and September of 2009 and then gradually fall to 5.8 percent in May of this year. Not even close to 8.2 percent, last month’s actual number.

After the stimulus was signed into law in February 2009, following the fourth quarter of 2008’s 6.2 percent drop in GDP, the administration put out new predictions claiming that unemployment would peak at 8.1 percent in 2009 and drop to 6.3 percent by now. Again, that is not even close to what has happened.

In March 2009, when some economists, such as Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, questioned whether the stimulus would produce the promised benefits, Obama supporter Paul Krugman attacked their honesty. In one blog post at the New York Times entitled “Roots of evil,” Krugman accused Mankiw of “more than a bit of deliberate obtuseness” and claimed that “we can expect fast growth.”

Claims that the economy was on the verge of improving go back to the very beginning of the administration. Larry Summers, who then served as Obama’s chief economic adviser, promised on January 25, 2009, that the economy would start improving “within weeks” of the stimulus plan’s being passed. Indeed, Summers touted the “shovel ready” nature of the jobs program as being “timely, targeted, and temporary.” It was supposedly targeted at hiring unemployed workers quickly, within 90 days, and lasting until the private sector was able to get back on its feet.

In March 2009, just five weeks after passing the stimulus, President Obama perceived an upswing and started off a press conference by announcing: “We’re beginning to see signs of progress. . . . This plan’s already saved the jobs of teachers and police officers. It’s creating construction jobs to rebuild roads and bridges.”

Obama declared later, in May, that the massive spending program was “already seeing results” and had created or saved almost 150,000 jobs.

By September 2009, Vice President Biden was gushing: “In my wildest dreams, I never thought [the stimulus] would work this well.”

In April of the following year, the unemployment rate was still at 9.8 percent, but Biden thought that now, for sure, the economy was just about to boom: “Some time in the next couple of months we’re going to be creating between 250,000 jobs a month and 500,000 jobs a month.” The administration touted the summer of 2010 as the “Summer of Recovery.”

But by the end of the next summer, in August 2011, the unemployment rate was still at 9.1 percent. It was no longer possible to claim the stimulus had worked well, so the Obama administration began its strategy of blaming the slow growth and high unemployment on everything but its own policies.

The earthquake in Japan, the debt crisis in Europe, the Arab Spring, and the rise in oil prices have all been blamed for the unprecedentedly slow recovery. But economic growth had already ground to a halt before those events transpired, during the first three months of 2011 — when GDP grew by just 0.1 percent.

If Obama’s economic predictions had come true, he surely would have claimed the stimulus was a success. But with a bad economy, he acts as if he knew that Bush’s policies would keep the economy from growing. Why should anyone trust Obama when he can’t even admit that all these predictions were wrong?

— John R. Lott Jr. is a FoxNews.com contributor and the co-author of the just released Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future (John Wiley & Sons).

Today, we decided to check out some statistics and facts out on the internet. It was relatively easy to decide what specifically to look for, particularly with a certain person in the Presidency who would like you to believe that he has not been in office a single day.

First off, we seached "Obama blames" into Google. We made certain to actually put it into quotation marks, so that the results had to have the words "Obama blames" in order. In other words, "Obama Blames Polar Bears for Global Warming" might show up, but "Obama: The Blame For Global Warming is Angry Chickens" would not.

The result? 573,000 matches. That's a lot of blame to go around. In comparison, "Bush Blames" receives only 207,000 results, and he was in office twice as long as Mr. Obama. If you search "Obama Blames" without quotation marks, you will find an astounding 10,700,000 results.

(Reuters) - The United States expressed alarm that its protégés in the Egyptian army were abusing hopes for democracy by ordering more military rule just as the Muslim Brotherhood was claiming victory in the country's first free presidential election.

The Islamists' self-assurance was contested by the other candidate in the run-off race, a former general who was prime minister when Hosni Mubarak was ousted last year by an army anxious to save itself from the revolution in the streets.

But there was still no result from the two-day poll, although independent officials privately spoke of a likely win for Islamist Mohamed Morsy over military man Ahmed Shafik.

Yet whatever the outcome - and one electoral supervisor said it might not be announced until Thursday - the new president was shorn in advance of much of his power by a decree issued by the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) just as polling stations closed and two days after it had dissolved a new, Islamist-led parliament.

The next five months should be interesting — given that Barack Obama is now experiencing something entirely unique in his heretofore stellar career: widespread criticism of his performance and increasing weariness with his boilerplate and his teleprompted eloquence.

Starting with his Occidental days, and going on through Columbia, Harvard, Chicago, the U.S. Senate, and the 2008 campaign, rarely has Mr. Obama faced much criticism, much less any accountability that would involve judging his rhetoric by actual achievement.

Yet what worked for so long now does no longer. Obama simply cannot run on 40 months of 8 percent–plus unemployment, a June 2009 recovery that sputtered, $5 trillion in new debt, serial $1 trillion–plus annual deficits, and dismal GDP growth. Few believe any more that what he and the Democratic Congress passed in the first two years of his administration worked — and fewer still that the Republicans are to blame in the last 17 months for stopping him from pursuing even more disastrous policies. He cannot turn instead to the advantages of Obamacare, a dynamic foreign policy, national-security sobriety, a scandal-free administration, or stellar presidential appointments. The furor over security leaks makes it harder to keep conjuring up the ghost of Osama bin Laden.

What then to expect if the race remains tight or Obama finds himself behind?

1. There will be lots more “the dog ate my homework” excuses for the dismal economy. The troubles in the EU, the Japanese tsunami, the East Coast earthquake, ATM machines, Wall Street, inclement weather, the Republican Congress, the Tea Party, and George W. Bush have pretty much been exhausted. But there is always hurricane season, a Greek exit from the euro, or a Middle East flare-up. Expect sometime before October to hear that a new “they” upset the brilliant recovery and is to blame for the chronic economic lethargy. One of the strangest aspects of Obama’s rationalizations is their utter incoherence and illogic: He brags that America pumped more oil and gas under his watch, even as he did his best to stop just that on public lands; he brags that he put in fewer regulations than did Bush, even as he boasts that he reined in business; he brags that he had to borrow $5 trillion to grow government in order to save the country, even as he claims he reduced the size of government. Why does Obama try to take credit for things on Tuesday that he damned on Monday? Is his new campaign theme: Despite (rather than because of) Obama?

2. Mitt Romney is a tough target. If Obama once loudly admitted to abuse of coke, Romney quietly confesses to avoidance even of Coca-Cola. His personal life is blameless. His family seems the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting. And Romney has more or less succeeded at most things he has attempted. No matter, he is Mormon. Expect legions of Obama surrogates to focus on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, especially its supposed endemic racism, sexism, and homophobia. Religious bigotry is not especially liberal, but the race/class/gender agenda trumps all such qualms, and in any case Obama and his team have never claimed to be especially tolerant or fair-minded in using any means necessary to achieve noble ends. Whereas the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Trinity Church were off the table in 2008, Mormonism will be very much on it by late summer.

3. We will read and hear about race 24/7. Racism is not an easy sell today, given that without tens of millions of white voters, Barack Obama would not have been elected. Nor is it easy to condemn America as racist when the white vote in 2008 was split far more evenly than were the 96 percent of African-American voters who preferred Barack Obama. Nonetheless, racial relations are at an all-time low. Almost weekly a member of the Congressional Black Caucus levels yet another bizarre charge of racism, and a Hollywood actor or singer blurts out something that would be deemed racially offensive were he not African-American; the polarization over the Trayvon Martin case threatens to overshadow the polarization over the O. J. Simpson trial; flash mobbing in the inner cities is as much daily fare on the uncensored Internet as it is absent from the network news; and both Barack Obama (the Skip Gates affair, the Trayvon Martin quip, the “punish our enemies” call, etc.) and Eric Holder (“cowards,” congressional oversight is racially motivated, “my people,” etc.) have made it a point to make race essential, not incidental, to their governance. If in 2008 liberals celebrated the election of Barack Obama as proof of a new postracial harmony, in 2012 a tight race will be cited as greater proof of a new ascendant racism. The idea that to elect Obama wins the nation racial exemption, and to defeat him earns condemnation, is illogical. No matter: By late fall, expect a desperate Obama administration to be dredging up the charge overtly, nonstop, and in person.

4. We should look for new furor against the “system” in direct proportion to the praise heaped on it in 2008 for being redeemed. The polls, if unfavorable, will be described as innately biased. The uncivil Rush Limbaugh, talk radio generally, Fox News, and tea-party bloggers, we will be lectured, are subversive, peddle hate, foment violence, and should be silenced. Whereas David Brooks, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and Christopher Buckley were recommended reading in 2008, given their balanced and fair-minded critiques of George W. Bush and their appreciation of Barack Obama, in 2012 we will learn that they are right-wing attack dogs for losing their enthusiasm for the first-class mind and temperament of Barack Obama. Whereas a Pat Buchanan on MSNBC railing against Bush’s war and McCain’s neocon advisers was a reminder of how the libertarian Right has positive affinities with the liberal Left, in 2012 such a paleocon “racist” must be kept off the airwaves. Voter-registration laws and voter-ID requirements, remember, are designed to exclude the oppressed and must be relaxed. Advertising has warped American politics. Super PACs are Romney conspiracies. If big Wall Street money went for Obama in 2008 and thereby won investment banking and the stock market exemption from charges of greed and corruption, in 2012 investors may swing to Romney and thereby incite calls to rein in “big money” and furious op-eds about the toxic mix of politics and cash. If Romney outraises Obama, we will hear again the calls for public campaign financing, which were ignored when a cash-flush Obama renounced public financing in 2008. In 2008, academics, foundation people, the Hollywood crowd, journalists, and liberal politicians confessed that they had fallen in love again with an America that had proved it was not hopeless after all; in 2012, America may prove unsalvageable, with thousands vowing to move to Canada.

5. Suddenly around October the world will become absolutely unsafe. In these dangerous times, Americans must forget their differences, come together, and embrace a bipartisan unity — given that it may be necessary, after all, to hit the Iranian nuclear facilities, since we’ll have learned that the bomb may be a reality by, say, mid-November. Just as we have been reminded that Barack Obama has saved us by his brave decisions to use double agents in Yemen, computer viruses in Iran, Seal Team Six in Pakistan, and philosophically guided Predator assassination hits, so too a strike against Iran may suddenly be of vital national-security interest, though keenly lamented by a Nobel laureate nose-deep in Thomas Aquinas. Cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline delighted greens; the war on the war on women pleased feminists; gays are now on board after Barack Obama decided he really did favor gay marriage; Latinos got nearly a million illegal aliens exempted from immigration law. And yet all those partisan gifts have not yet resulted in a 50 percent approval rating or a lead over Mitt Romney. Something more dramatic is needed, given that there are only so many Obama heroics that can be cobbled together and leaked from classified sources.

We do not know who is going to win the 2012 election, only that it will be closer than the 2008 one — and if Obama keeps it up at his present rate he may destroy the Democratic party for a generation. There is no longer an incumbent George Bush to blame. Romney is a feistier candidate than was John McCain. Fundraising is no longer lopsided. The novelty of the first African-American president has become passé. And “hope and change” has been replaced by a concrete record of three and a half years. Given those realities, if his being an unknown quantity was a reason to vote for Barack Obama in 2008, his being all too familiar will be cause for rejecting him in 2012.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

As Barack Obama's lead over Mitt Romney in the polls narrows, and his presumed fundraising advantage seems about to become a disadvantage, it's alibi time for some of his backers.

His problem, they say, is that some voters don't like him because he's black. Or they don't like his policies because they don't like having a black president.

So, you see, if you don't like Obamacare, it's not because it threatens to take away your health insurance, or to deny coverage for some treatments. It's because you don't like black people.

This sort of thing seems to be getting more frequent, or at least more open. As White House Dossier writer Keith Koffler notes, HBO host Bill Maher accused Internet tyro Matt Drudge of being animated by racism because he highlights anti-Obama stories.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown if House Chairman Darrell Issa's treatment of Attorney General Eric Holder was "ethnic." Brown agreed, and Matthews said some Republicans "talk down to the president and his friends."

There's an obvious problem with the racism alibi. Barack Obama has run for president before, and he won. Voters in 2008 knew he was black. Most of them voted for him. He carried 28 states and won 365 electoral votes.

Nationwide, he won 53 percent of the popular vote. That may not sound like a landslide, but it's a higher percentage than any Democratic nominee except Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

Democratic national conventions have selected nominees 45 times since 1832. In seven cases, they won more than 53 percent of the vote. In 37 cases, they won less.

That means President Obama won a larger percentage of the vote than Martin Van Buren, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and (though you probably don't want to bring this up in conversation with him) Bill Clinton.

Now it is true that you can go out in America and find people who would just never vote for a black person. But it's a lot harder than it was a generation or two ago, when most voters admitted to pollsters they would never vote for a black president.

And you can probably find some people who usually vote for Democrats but would not vote for a black Democrat. But not very many of them, and they're likely to be pretty advanced in age, and so there are likely fewer of them around than there were four years ago.

My own view is that such voters were more than counterbalanced by voters who felt that, as an abstract proposition in the light of our history, it would be a good thing for Americans to elect a black president.

In 2008, Obama, who came to national attention by decrying the polarization of Red-state and Blue-state America, had obvious appeal to voters. I think there is a similar, and similarly unquantifiable, factor working for Obama this year: Many voters feel, as an abstract proposition, that it would be a bad thing for American voters to reject the first black president.

Some conservatives complain that there is a double standard, that whites who vote against Obama are accused of racial motives, while blacks, 95 percent of whom voted for him, are not.

I think that's unfair. Members of an identifiable group that has been in some way excluded from full recognition as citizens will naturally tend to support a candidate who could be the first president from that group. In 1960, Gallup reported that 78 percent of American Catholics voted for John Kennedy.

American blacks have suffered exclusion and discrimination more than any other group. And very large percentages of them regularly vote for candidates who share Obama's views on issues.

What's remarkable about our politics in 2008 and today is that most voters seem to be making their decisions based on their assessment of the issues and the character of the candidates.

The fact that some have, at least for the moment, moved away from supporting Obama to opposing him, or remain unsure, reflects not an increasing racism, but the fact that we simply have more information than we had four years ago.

Most of us are disappointed when our candidates don't win. But that's no excuse for phony alibis.

The Obama White House says Americans should not “read too much into” the latest bad news from the jobs front. Employers added just 80,000 new jobs in June — far fewer than needed for a healthy recovery — and the unemployment rate stayed at 8.2 percent.

Not long after the new figures were released, the White House sent out a statement from Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Facing a bleak situation yet again, Krueger said, “It is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.”

If that sounds familiar, it is because that is what the Obama White House has said during month after month of troubling economic reports. The White House has said it so often, in fact, that the Romney campaign has compiled a list of 30 — yes, 30 — examples, going back to November 2009, of the administration cautioning that Americans should not “read too much into” the latest bad economic news. Here, from the Romney campaign, is that list:

October 2011: “The monthly employment and unemployment numbers are volatile and employment estimates are subject to substantial revision. There is no better example than August’s jobs figure, which was initially reported at zero and in the latest revision increased to 104,000. This illustrates why the Administration always stresses it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/11/04/employment-situation-october)

Off-teleprompter, the President is nothing if not a disaster, and this morning in Ohio, fresh off another heartbreaking jobs report for the American people, Obama attempted to wax eloquent to a small group about the beauty of the middle class and how he is its savior. According to Obama, it was his desire to save the middle class that drove him to get into politics and run for the Illinois State Senate.

Emphasis is mine:

The reason I ran for president, the reason I ran the first time for a State Senate seat on the Southside of Chicago, was because for too many people, that bargain, that dream, felt like it was slipping away. We had gone through a decade where people were working harder and harder, but we didn’t see an increase in income. And profits were going sky high for a lot of companies but jobs weren't growing fast enough. And the cost of everything from health care to college tuition to grocery to gas kept going up faster than people's incomes.

So a lot of folks felt like that idea that we could not only live a good middle class life but more importantly we could pass it on to our kids and they could succeed the way we might not have imagined. They could go to college and do some things we couldn’t imagine doing. That felt like it was slipping away from too many people. That's why I got into politics.

We'll get to how factually challenged all of that is in a bit, but Obama's bid for the Illinois State Senate occurred in 1996, which means that he's trashing the results of Bill Clinton's first term. Clinton ran for reelection in 1996 and won in a walk, largely due to an economy that was thriving. Whether you credit Clinton or the Republican Congress (I credit both) for the economic boom of the 90s, for Obama to trash 1996 as a time when the middle class felt the dream all slipping away is not only nonsense to those of us who lived through it; it is also factually untrue.

During 1996, the U.S. economy saw moderately high growth with low inflation and historically low unemployment. Gross domestic product is forecast to have grown 2.8 percent for 1996. The economy created approximately 2.5 million additional jobs in 1996, a 2.1 percent increase from 1995 levels. Inflation again remained low, around 3.0 percent, and the Federal Reserve was reluctant to change interest rates throughout the year on signs of a slowing economy.

In 1996, we were all feeling the effects of an actual recovery after the shallow recession that cost the first President Bush his job. Clinton's opponent, Bob Dole, lost mainly due to the fact that there were no issues for him to hit Clinton with on the only issue that matters, the economy.

As far as the facts: Obama is also near-delusional talking about gas prices, tuition, and the price of health care increasing in 1996. Under Obama, gas prices have exploded, tuition costs are burying students in mortgage-size debt after they graduate college, and the cost of healthcare has increased almost $2500 per family since 2008. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t kiss What Life Was Like In 1996 on the lips right now.

Furthermore, for Obama to stand there after three and a half years in office and trash 1996 as income, the GDP, manufacturing, and job creation under his watch are all falling -- for him to stand there and pretend to be the Guardian of the Middle Class after jamming through ObamaCare against the wishes of the middle class who will most certainly bear the brunt of this monstrous burden -- is what one might call…

Today Barack Obama blamed his four years of trillion dollar deficits on the Bush tax cuts. From the president’s Weekly Address:

You see, Republicans in Congress and their nominee for President believe that the best way to create prosperity in America is to let it trickle down from the top. They believe that if our country spends trillions more on tax cuts for the wealthy, we’ll somehow create jobs – even if we have to pay for it by gutting things like education and training and by raising middle-class taxes.

They’re wrong. And I know they’re wrong because we already tried it that way for most of the last decade. It didn’t work. We’re still paying for trillions of dollars in tax cuts that benefitted the wealthiest Americans more than anyone else; tax cuts that didn’t lead to the middle class jobs or higher wages we were promised and that helped take us from record surpluses to record deficits.

And, of course, he’ll get away with these completely inaccurate statements.

In an interview with Black Enterprise magazine, President Barack Obama blames state and local governments, as well as Congress, for over 14 percent black unemployment.

"Black unemployment still stands at nearly 14%. How do you communicate that the economy is headed in the right direction?," the editor in chief of Black Enterprise asks Obama.

"Most economists will tell you that there is no doubt the economy has gotten stronger, but we are digging ourselves out a deep hole. There are a lot more things we could be doing. To get them done, we need cooperation of Congress. We got the payroll tax portion of [my American Jobs Act] done, but what we didn’t get done is the assistance I was proposing to the states to help them hire back teachers, firefighters, and first responders, because one of the weakest parts of this recovery has been state and local government hiring," Obama responds.

"Given the weaknesses of the construction industry, the American Jobs Act proposed that we rebuild schools, roads, bridges, airport, and ports. That would provide small businesses with opportunities as contractors and vendors in this rebuilding process. Again, Congress needs to act."

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, black unemployment in the month of July was at 14.1 percent.

Additionally, Obama was asked, “How do you respond to criticism that your administration hasn’t done enough to support black businesses?”

The president responded: "My general view has been consistent throughout, which is that I want all businesses to succeed. I want all Americans to have opportunity. I’m not the president of black America. I’m the president of the United States of America, but the programs that we have put in place have been directed at those folks who are least able to get financing through conventional means, who have been in the past locked out of opportunities that were available to everybody. So, I’ll put my track record up against anybody in terms of us putting in place broad-based programs that ultimately had a huge benefit for African American businesses."

Today, President Obama sent out a campaign email essentially blaming his supporters if he loses. See, he’s supposedly being outspent. And because he’s supposedly being outspent, he’s losing. And he can’t spend more money unless his supporters fork it over.This is the campaign version of Obama’s entire economic argument: he can’t fix the economy unless he spends more money. And unless we give him more money, he can’t spend it. So if the economy fails, it’s our fault.Here’s the perverse logic:Last week, when I was in Iowa, voters told me they were feeling it. The numbers back it up: Our side is getting outspent 2-to-1 on the air there.But the folks asking me about this don't want an explanation -- they want to know what I'm going to do about it.

And the fact is that solving this problem is up to you ….We're losing this air war right now.

I don't have as much time to campaign this time as I did in 2008, so this whole thing is riding on you making it happen.

Perhaps the most laughable aspect of this latest desperate missive is Obama’s assertion that he doesn’t have “as much time to campaign this time as I did in 2008.” He’s done nothing but campaign since the beginning of the year. From January to mid-June, Obama held more than 160 fundraisers. During that same period in 2004, President George W. Bush had held just 79 fundraisers.

Here’s the sad fact for Obama: nobody’s enamored with him anymore. His spendthrift ways haven’t just bankrupted the country – they’ve bankrupted his campaign. And he still blames everyone else.

First lady Michelle Obama, speaking in Gainesville, Fla., on Monday, said that while the nation was on the verge of another Great Depression, President Barack Obama did not assign blame – instead “he got to work.”

“The economy was losing 800,000 jobs every month, and a lot folks wondered whether we were headed for another great depression. Now this is what Barack faced on day one as president. That’s what awaited him, but instead of pointing fingers and placing blame, Barack got to work, because he was thinking about folks like my dad, like his grandmother,” the first lady said.

“Since the day he took office, on issue after issue, crisis after crisis, that’s what I’ve seen, that’s what we’ve all seen in my husband. We’ve seen his values at work. We’ve seen his vision unfold. We’ve seen the depths of his character, courage, and convictions. Here’s proof: Think back to when Barack first took office, and our economy was on the brink of collapse,” she said.

Obama claim that Bush is 90% responsible for current deficit gets 100% of Pinocchios at WaPo

posted at 10:01 am on September 26, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

I hit this 60 Minutes quote two days ago in yesterday’s OOTD, but it’s worth revisiting in the form of Glenn Kessler’s fact check at the Washington Post. Kessler misses one of the biggest problems with Barack Obama’s response to Steve Kroft’s question, which was about national debt, and Obama responded by talking about deficits — two different issues, although related. I’ll put the question and the longer answer provided by Kessler together, emphases mine:

KROFT: The national debt has gone up sixty percent in — in the four years that you’ve been in office.

OBAMA: Well, first — first of all, Steve, I think it’s important to understand the context here. When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history. And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but ninety percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10 percent of this increase in the deficit, and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.

Now, if the deficit goes up, the solution would be to either spend less or tax more. Obama has done neither in any of his budget proposals, and as I wrote yesterday, his last two budget proposals would have made the situation worse — which is why even his own party gave neither of them so much as one supporter in three floor votes. Furthermore, the FY2009 budget in place when Obama took office was the creation of the Democrat-controlled House and Senate from the year before, and it was signed into law by Obama in March 2009, not Bush, after Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid played keep-away in the fall of 2008. Barack Obama was part of that effort as a member of the Senate.

Kessler skips over these points to address Obama’s argument that the structural deficit is 90% George Bush’s problem. Kessler says it’s the other way around — that Bush policies account for about 10% of the current annual structural budget deficit, and the rest is evenly split between bad projections from the CBO and Obama’s spending and economic policies:

As can be seen above, CBO’s errors in forecasting played a large role in the demise of the projected surpluses. CBO had kept counting on a gusher of capital gains revenue — and then obviously failed to predict the recession of 2008.

But Obama’s policies also played a big role during his presidency. Using the CBO data for the years 2009-2011, here’s a very rough calculation of the contribution to the deficit. To keep things simple, we did not try to allocate interest expense, and we did not include categories of spending or taxes that were difficult to allocate.

The 2009 fiscal year is especially hard because that budget year is so much of an amalgam of Bush and Obama policies; we essentially split the cost of the Troubled Asset Relief Program between the two of them. Since this is not intended to be exact, but illustrative, we have rounded numbers and percentages:

Clearly, a huge part of the deficit problem — about half — stems from the recession and forecasting errors. But Obama’s policies represent a big chunk as well.

So how many Pinocchios does Obama get? One hundred percent of them:

Obama certainly inherited an economic mess, and that accounts for a large part of the deficit. But Obama pushed for spending increases and tax cuts that also have contributed in important ways to the nation’s fiscal deterioration. He certainly could argue that these were necessary and important steps to take, but he can’t blithely suggest that 90 percent of the current deficit “is as a consequence” of his predecessor’s policies — and not his own.

As for the citing of the discredited MarketWatch column, we have repeatedly urged the administration to rely on estimates from official government agencies, such as the White House budget office. It is astonishing to see the president repeat this faulty claim once again, as if it were an established fact. Four Pinocchios[.]

And as Kessler points out, the real structural bomb to annual deficits has yet to be triggered. ObamaCare may be deficit neutral in its first ten years — which is still arguable, and based on a fiscal shell game — but after that, “all bets are off